Category Archives: Portland Mercury

I’m forever deliberating over the impact nanobreweries can or do have on a city’s beer culture. For every Commons (nee Beetje) brewery in Portland or Hess in San Diego, there are seemingly a dozen more that think they can emulate that level of success. To find out what these nanobrewers want to get out of the brewing industry, and what they think can have to contribute, I went straight to the teensy-tiny sources in my August turn at the Mercury’s Lush Life column.

When the CBC hit Portland last year, I said, Man, I gotta write something about this for the Portland Mercury. Which I did. (Then, once the hangover waned, I recapped CBC events for 1859.) When, a year later (present date), CiderCon was heading to, uh, Cidervana, I pitched doing a bigger story and maybe we put it on the cover and really show those cider makers from other places outside the Northwest how big fermented apples are here and what a true cider city looks and reads like. They bought it. Even cooler, I somehow finagled an assignment for 1,800 words into 3,000. Clearly, there’s a lot to say about cider.

It was apparently National Ketchup Day, and the third annual one at that. Enter a malty homage to tomato paste and vinegar: two collaboration beers from Portland’s Coalition Brewing (who are gearing up for their fifth anniversary) and Portland-via-Eugene’s Red Duck Ketchup.

Perhaps Portland has more breweries than any city in the world because it has more diehard craft-beer drinkers who live to let their livers process as much new, unique beer as possible. But along with in that scenario comes the “problem” that folks will always want to try something they haven’t tasted before. For one day only, one taphouse provided a solution by accumulating a baker’s dozen kegs from Oregon’s remotest breweries. Full disclosure: I’m the guy who organized The Rural Brewer.

Oh, is it beer fest season? It certainly feels as if they occur at a rate of more than one a week. Having said that, only a handful feel like cornerstones of the yearlong sudsy celebration, and the upcoming fifth annual Portland Fruit Beer Festival is deservedly one of them.

As a freelance writer, I’m basically grateful for any publisher and editor willing to suffer my pitches, edit my work, and spend the ink or kilobytes to publish it. Thusly, I bid a fond adieu to typing about beer for Portland’s other alt-weekly, Willamette Week, and merrily begin doing such for The Merc who graciously extended the role of beer blogger and, soon enough, columnist. This entails 1-2 weekly blog posts on beer news big and small, breaking or just timely, and again, sooner than later, a half-page column in the paper.